No, protected bike lanes are probably not too expensive for your city to build (chart)

March 05, 2014

Michael Andersen, Green Lane Project staff writer

Last week, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition published a brief exploration of what it called the "myth" that "there's no way we can keep spending so much on bike lanes with so many other pressing needs in San Francisco."

To make their point that dramatically improving biking and walking in a city costs almost nothing compared to many other transportation projects — in San Francisco, one of the bike-friendliest cities in the country, bike projects take up less than 1 percent of the municipal transportation budget — they listed some typical cost figures.

We decided to further explore this question by creating a simple bar chart, based on the same data. We'll let you draw whatever conclusions you see fit.